The success
that the United States has had in the war on terror, and that it will have in
the future, is due in part to the operational capabilities and intellectual
capacity of our professional military. This article examines how West Point
teaches future military officers about terrorism and counterterrorism. The views
expressed are those of the author and not of the Department of the Army, the
U.S. Military Academy, or any other agency of the U.S. Government.

The Academic Program at West Point

The synergy
that results from the linkage of the best operators in the world and the best
intellectuals in the world is truly awesome and is sorely need in the fight
against terrorism. West Point is a place in which this synergy is envisioned
- a
strategic collaboration between the academic professional and the military
officer. Nearly two-thirds of the faculty are junior officers, mostly at the
rank of captain and major, and today, many of them have recent combat experience
from Afghanistan and Iraq. About 23% of the faculty are civilians and the
remaining 12% are senior military officers at the rank of colonel or general.
This partnership between the practitioner and the academic is meant to ensure
the quality of the curriculum as well as its relevance to developing competence
in the profession of arms.

In preparing this curriculum, the Department of the Army provides guidance about
what is required for success in this profession. From this, we know that
military officers need to develop physical fitness, academic skills and
knowledge, and what we call military officership. Thus, the West Point
experience includes developmental programs in all three of these areas. In the
academic program area, we understand that the education of military officers
requires an understanding of history, foreign policy, organizational behavior,
and other disciplines relevant to the military profession. As a result, the West
Point curriculum is multidisciplinary - very similar to most any other liberal
arts college, but with an extra layer of plain old discipline thrown in there
for good measure.

Cadets take a mixture of courses in the humanities, social sciences, math,
engineering and the natural sciences. The content of these 30 required courses
is organized around a set of ten multidisciplinary academic program goals (see
Figure 1), based on our expectations for what an Army leader must know and be.

Figure 1: Academic Program Goals at West Point

Army officers must:

demonstrate:

creativity

moral awareness

commitment to continued intellectual development

effective listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills

and understand:

culture

history

patterns of human behavior

mathematics and science

engineering and technology

information technology

Source: Educating
Future Officers for a Changing World (USMA Office of the Dean, 2002).

These Academic Program goals have particular importance to developing an
officers understanding of how to effectively combat terrorism. For example, an
understanding of history, culture and human behavior is clearly vital for any
effective counterterrorism effort. An officer must be able to effectively
communicate his understanding in these areas to his soldiers, as well as
communicate with other military forces and with local populations. In combating
terrorism, creative solutions are often required to complicated situations, and
as events like Abu Ghraib clearly demonstrated, military officers must conduct
themselves with the highest level of integrity and moral grounding.

Todays military officers must also have a comprehensive grasp of asymmetric
warfare principles and strategies. In addition to appreciating the enemys
strategies, motivations, goals and tactics, we must develop an understanding for
how complex, networked, decentralized, loosely organized groups operate. From
this understanding, we can identify the political, cultural, organizational and
financial seams within those networked organizations, so that ways can be found
to exploit these seams in order to degrade their operational capabilities.
Military officers also require an appreciation for systems thinking and the
phenomena of second- and third-order effects. Military education programs must,
therefore, stay abreast of new developments in the science disciplines,
especially in networks and complexity theory. Future strategic decision-makers
and operational-level commanders also require new kinds of pattern recognition
skills in order to cope with future multidimensional warfare.

In an asymmetric warfare environment, military officers at all levels require
significant amounts of strategic-level situational awareness. For example, right
now in Iraq, junior officers are in constant need of more strategic-level
information. They need to attack the enemys strategy, not just the active
fighters. At the same time, platoon sergeants are now making decisions that
impact our nations political and military strategy. Military officers must know
several kinds of geographies and histories (physical, political and cultural) in
order to provide their soldiers with the necessary situational awareness. For
example, knowing the political and cultural landscape is vital for understanding
the range of possible tactics that are available to a local terrorist group, as
well as historical grievances that may influence local support for insurgencies.
Officers must also find effective means for the collection and integration of
human intelligence. Not only must officers learn from local informants, but they
also must learn from their soldiers. Situational awareness and intelligence can
also enable officers to recognize the telltale signs of chemical, biological and
radiological weapons development.

And equally important, military officers must understand the non-kinetic
dimensions of todays conflicts. An insurgency is conducted in numerous
locations simultaneously, including the information battlespace. Officers must
think in terms of influence and combined actions, as well as the impact that
military operations will have on local perceptions. They must have a full
appreciation of many forms of technology, and understand what skill sets are
needed for conducting strategic communications and cyber-warfare. At the same
time, military professionals must remember to avoid over-reliance on technology
in their efforts to gain real situational awareness. Overall, future military
officers must be able to anticipate and respond effectively to the uncertainties
of a changing technological, social, political, and economic world: a world in
which the military will play an increasingly prominent role in combating
terrorism.

The Study of Terrorism at West Point

It is within
this context that, following the events of September 11th, we
developed a program of study in terrorism and counterterrorism at the
U.S.
Military Academy. The Combating
Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point was
launched in 2002 with a generous grant from Vincent Viola, a 1977 graduate of
the Military Academy and the former Chairman of the New York Mercantile
Exchange. The CTC is almost entirely funded by private donations. Brigadier
General (r) Russell Howard, the former head of the Department of Social
Sciences, directed the center during these early years, and we were fortunate to
bring on board as our distinguished chair Wayne Downing, a retired 4-star
general and former commander of all U.S. Special Forces.

The CTC now employs a team of civilian and military faculty whose work is
organized around four themes: terrorism; counterterrorism; homeland security; and,
weapons of mass destruction. These faculty have developed courses, conducted
research, and produced publications within the first three (under the guidance
of senior advisors like Dr. Bruce Hoffman, Dr. Rohan Gunaratna, and Dr. David
Franz), and the CTC has recently received a grant from the Sloan Foundation to
develop courses and research on bioterrorism. These courses are offered to all
upper-division cadets at West Point, and enrollment in these courses has (as one
might imagine) skyrocketed from dozens to hundreds within just the last few
years. The CTC has also recently inaugurated a new Minor in Terrorism Studies
program - the very first academic minor program in West Points history.

New security environments and new roles and expectations require new forms of
education for the military profession. Officers must have a total grasp of the
struggle, not just the terrorist acts. Their education must help them answer a
number of new and important questions like: Why is terrorism being used as
a tactic? What are the political goals of this group? It this part of an
insurgency? What are the political, social, economic, cultural and information
dimensions of the conflict, as well as the security and military aspects? How do
these interrelate? Questions like these frame the lesson topics that are
included in the basic terrorism courses.

For example, in these courses we study the history of terrorism, using case
studies to examine a diverse array of groups including anarchists, ethnic
separatists, and religious extremists. We explore the organizational strategies
of terrorist groups and the individual motivations of their members, and focus
on specific dynamics such as recruitment, training, ideology, and communication.
Cadets examine various facilitators of terrorism, such as transnational
financial and criminal networks, and gain an appreciation for the organizational
learning aspects of terrorist groups. Naturally, recent trends in terrorism are
covered in these courses, and cadets conduct their own research about events in
places like Spain, Indonesia, Britain, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Israel, and, of
course, Iraq. We also examine local circumstances that support terrorism,
including the political, economic and social conditions that existed before
terrorism became a problem.

And, of course, we spend some time learning about U.S. policy for combating
terrorism. We examine the U.S. National Security Strategy, the Strategy for
Combating Terrorism, the Homeland Security Strategy, and so forth. We also
explore the seven key dimensions of national power, emphasizing that the
military is only one aspect to a Counterterrorism Strategy, the others being
intelligence gathering and sharing; diplomacy; legal/law enforcement;
information operations; finance; and, economics. Overall, we spend very little
time in these classes discussing the details of counterterrorism operations.
Rather, our approach to the study of terrorism is built upon a conviction that
training in tactics, techniques, and procedures in counterterrorism are only
useful when the leaders have acquired an appropriate intellectual background and
can master the competencies described above. Thus, we emphasize first and
foremost the need to be educated, critical thinkers about terrorism and the
reasons why some groups adopt a strategy of terror as a means for achieving
their objectives.

The Road Ahead

The worlds
first historian, Thucydides, once wrote that "The nation that makes a great
distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by
cowards and its fighting done by fools." In the war on terrorism it is vital for
us to link the scholars and the warriors - the intellectuals and the operators.
This is the purpose of places like West Point. Our Academic Program produces
scholarly warriors, and our courses on terrorism are designed to develop the
competencies that we believe military officers must have in order to deal
effectively with the global terrorist threat.

Sun Tzus insistence on knowing yourself is critical to the success of any
military organization. The education of future military officers must foster a
commitment to critical, reflective analysis on structural and cultural
challenges. The leaders of the Academic Program at West Point are also engaged
in a process of reflective analysis. As we learn from our assessment of various
performance measures, including interviews with former battalion commanders
about the West Point graduates who have served with them, we will continue to
refine our educational programs and courses in ways that will ensure our
graduates ability to meet the present and future challenges of the global
security environment with increasing sophistication and success.

Dr. James Forest is the
Director of Terrorism Studies at the U.S. Military Academy, where he leads
educational and research initiatives for the Combating Terrorism Center at West
Point. He can be reached through his website
Teaching
Terror.

[1]
An earlier version of this essay was published as How to Think Like a
Terrorist, in The Officer (April, 2006) p. 36-37.